In the House of the Hangman 1250

I wake in the morning to find all the hotel room windows are
made of glass. Gangs of men stand outside and stare. I sneak through a secret
door in the bathroom to the front desk to request a late checkout. When I
return to my room, I find that men have gone through all my belongings and left
big wet yellow handprints of pee all over everything. I try to find a private
place in the bathroom to change my clothes, only to find there’s a secretary
sitting at a desk, typing behind the toilet. We are feral children, living in
abandoned tunneled concrete underground. The surface = danger. The bits of
garbage, our remaindered archaeologies, are precious to us and we arrange them
with care, treat them as artifacts. Suddenly, there’s an unmarked van on the
surface come to rescue us. Half of us move half of our fractured crockery, our
rusted pipes, our cracked plastic up to the surface. The other half will come
the next day. At night the tunnels and rooms collapse while we wait. Don’t look
back. Don’t look back. I woke up with a heavy stone in my chest. The sea, its
strange shores and incandescent glow of planets low in the sky, close to earth,
for hours or minutes, come together and Opherion, Orpheus, the underworld all
become visible, they’ve made holes in our shirts, dulled our skin and breath,
taken away our breath. “Look up now, weike wreche, and see what thou arte … swink and swete in al that thou canst and
mayst, for to gete thee a trewe knowyng and a feling of thiself as thou arte.”
(Cloud of Unknowing). “I am a worm and no man.” Which means, Nicola, that you
get to regenerate when you’re cut in half! Let “things be what they are, sort
of” again. There’s nothing more to do “against the winter cold and futility”
than preserve fruit, which is “a human thing, and intelligent as well.”
Essentially, we’re doing things in the face of our inevitable death, and we’re
doing them because that’s what we do. The poem finishes with two turns that punctuate the overall philosophy, the first a threat to a
movie theater patron who has to be “flushed out so the hunters can have a crack
at him,” the other a faux-inspirational salute to the reader, encouraging us to
“go out there / and enjoy yourself, and yes, enjoy your philosophy of life,
too,” before closing with the joke, “Look out! There’s a big one. . .” Mercury
retrograde, even if you don’t exist and it’s just my general awkwardness still
with my touchscreen, I just deleted a bunch of numbers in my phone and a text
from Gen Isis that I didn’t realize was hers. Anyhoo, also, if you’re going to
be at AWP, we should have each other’s numbers so PM your cells. That sounds so
cool and biological: “cool brown / snow (saxophone) / falling on my tow”: “Oh
flower of water’s rent”: “walk over me / I”: “Autumn-Time, Wind and the Planet
Pluto”: “I bathe me anonymous”: We are always on top of the belvederes charming
the birds / And your shoulders and arms at night, a successful branch of my
favorite coaches, each in the form of / Sparks we can do quickly / A man
who leads himself in his room, when we bent glass sculptures sigh / Sharp holes
in your bed / Deer through the hole in the ash can be seen in the glade Kashima
/ Without looking at the roots of the heavy air attack of the locomotives / Report a jungle earn died
/ All inputs and blue serpents Be in the Jacinths / Then they left and rotate crops thread
/ Each night, a person who can not understand that there
are indications / This is the first single from the packing cases and are
amazed at his home / The corridors and stairs to her room / Stairs going to
be out of date / This leads to a sudden, in a public square in the
mill by stretching / The appearance of swans with wings spread balustrades / If they
cut the interior / But all open to the sound of feet, move to the
contents of the drawers / Ice trays and drawers drawers drawers bread and wine
soap drawer / Meat tray with hair hands full / Without turning around the back
of the chest exposed / You hold us back round our Smile / And enjoy the views
/Under the veil of a woman we never see happy people I loved it. It’s
the events we lumpen / struggle agro-crop to / imagine the woops of /
primordial density perturbation / or instant class consciousness / you know sea
all swelly / of a sudden / … / where did anything come from / … / we in this
y’all / crap thrown fast from … Yet as Elisa Lam lay floating in a hotel water
tank, decomposing without the preservative assistance of the formaldehyde in
Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone
Living”, guests at the hotel drank her fluids. And “in a matter of seconds, the
earth opened under Jeff Bush’s bedroom and swallowed him up. About the only
thing left was the TV cable running down into the hole.”